Collaboration with Daedalic Entertainment

Hello everyone!

We are finally able to share some big news with you: we have secured a publishing collaboration deal for Barotrauma with Daedalic Entertainment, a German video game publisher. We met them at Game Connection Europe last October, where we also won that nice award for Baro, so this deal has been in the making for some time, behind the scenes.

So, what does this mean for us and the game? Besides the obvious – it’s a huge reward in itself to know that we’ve created a game that interests publishers – this collaboration will make a world of difference in launching the game. Publishing and marketing Barotrauma by ourselves would have been a tremendous effort, even with the pretty robust team that we have now. With a publisher on board, we get to focus on doing what we do best: developing the game.

So this is truly a load off our shoulders, and the help couldn’t have arrived at a better time: Early Access launch is coming in a couple of months, and thanks to our Alpha testers and all your feedback, we have a solid roadmap, but also a lot to do. And despite having industry experts handling our PR now, we do get to take part in that too: we’ll be showcasing Barotrauma in GDC and PAX East next month, so please come and check it out if you happen to be around!

Getting there!

In addition to PR and marketing, Daedalic will provide support for translating the game into different languages as well as further help with testing and QA. They also have a much more sophisticated player support platform than ours, which will be a big help when the game starts getting more new players than we here could easily handle by ourselves. You will continue to find us lurking in all our usual places, though, always happy to answer questions and curious to hear what you think.

A couple of things to note here: when Barotrauma is released on Steam, we will be taking out the art/audio assets from the GitHub repository. This is to prevent anyone who would go to the trouble of cloning a Git repo and figuring out how to compile it (not the easiest way to pirate a game to begin with) from doing that. However, the code will still be available for mod developers, as always, and the rest of the assets can be found in the Steam install folder. Also, if anyone still needs to download the legacy version, from now on and until our Early Access release, it will be available on the Undertow Games website.

In the coming weeks, we’re going to write a bit about Barotrauma’s history (reaching a big milestone like this just makes you want to take a trip down memory lane), and we will also bring you some updates about what our testers have uncovered and what aspects of the game you can expect to change between now and launch.

Before that though, we have a brand new trailer ready for you. Take a look!